Sparks Brain Preservation

I've worked out a general plan for our fees over the next few years. Membership fees won't change. I like a nice stable and reasonable membership fee. But our preservation fee is going to need to go up significantly. As our nationwide locations get remodeled and staffed, the fee will need to reflect that higher quality service. Nearly all of the fees will go into our immediate response capabilities rather than storage costs. We can't raise fees right now because we are not providing a service that justifies a higher fee. I think we will end up charging about $50k within about three years. If we can rescue you quickly and reliably, it will be so worth it. If economies of scale start to kick in, with hundreds of patients per year, then we could probably lower our fee a little bit. So that's my estimate at the moment, but we'll see how it goes.

Also, we will start accepting whole bodies for permanent storage in chemical fixative. The reason for this is to broaden our customer base. Some people will insist on whole body, so this could be attractive to them. We are still internally debating what we might charge for this, but we have decided to move forward with it.

I would also like to point out that providing standby is much easier when it's a short drive for employees rather than a flight. They don't have to be very far from home and they can rotate through as needed. Our procedures can be performed very well by one or two people, so a standby is not the massively expensive ordeal that it is with cryonics. I suspect that our standby fee will mostly vanish, but it's probably not going to be quite that simple. I suspect that we will be able to do much more standby activity. We're not there yet, so standby is still showing as a separate fee, but that's where we are headed.

I take it back. Fees will certainly not go down with economies of scale. Instead, response time will go down. Locations will be added in Seattle, Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake City, Washington DC, Boston, etc, etc. Granted, we're a long way off from any of that, but it helps to plan very far ahead so we know how to get to our goal more quickly. It's going to depend on how quickly we can increase demand. Our immediate short term plan to reach 278 million people in less than 6 hours is a decent start.

What about members who travel to your Salem Oregon facility for preservation there? Do the higher fees still apply to them even though you say that the reason for the higher fees is to provide good standby service?

We decided to set a single uniform fee for simplicity. That strategy has not yet been put to the test of time, so we'll see how that goes. Since we will have 8 facilities, your question could apply to any of the 8 facilities, right? Don't all 8 facilities cost money to keep functional? The one in Salem is actually the most expensive building and has the most staff. So maybe we should charge more for services in Salem. I'm just playing the devil's advocate. I was originally not considering the cost of running the Salem facility when setting fees because I would have that facility for myself anyway. But we want to make this whole thing self sustaining to some degree. So I still think a uniform fee makes sense. Those who live near or travel to a facility will get better quality preservation for the same fee. If you absolutely cannot afford it, we will work with you, and we will do the preservation anyway.

Ok thanks

We've settled on $60k because we've rolled nationwide standby into that fee. That fee is now live and we are ready to provide that service. We're working on some sort of financial aid form for those who find that to be unaffordable.